Interview by City Magazine
Name:
Mary Mattingly
Based in: NYC (Live: LIC, Studio: LES)
Type of art: Photography and Sculpture
CM: What has been the highlight of your
career so far? MM: The highlight of my practice is the project I am currently
working on called the Waterpod, because the process is very challenging and
when it is done it will really transform my life, and my live-work spaces in an
experimental way, and Im not sure what the outcome will be. The triennial at the International
Center of Photography, titled Ecotopia, was a big deal for me because the
exhibitions featured image was mine, and that attention has brought me many
opportunities. Currently, my work
is part of the Prix Pictet, an international award recognizing sustainability in
photography with a series of shows beginning with the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Who has been the biggest artistic inspiration
in your life? To limit this as much as possible: Franois Truffaut, Constant
Nieuwenhuys, Buckminster Fuller, and Samuel Beckett.
What are you currently working on now? I am currently working on two bodies of work: Anatomy of Melancholy and Nomadographies. Anatomy of Melancholy is a study of both sculptural installations and actual spaces that provoke feelings of melancholy, based on the failure of an ideal or failing of a would-be utopia. For instance, I documented the Biosphere II outside of Tucson, Arizona, a Titan Missile Silo, and Theodore Kaczynskis cabin. Nomadographies includes photography, sculpture, and video and tracks a lone pilgrim in a hybrid bicycle. I am also creating a living structure called the Waterpod that will be completed in 2009. To do this, I am collaborating with an artistic and scientific team to make it an autonomous space created from all recycled materials, where we will experiment living in this permanently mobile structure made for the rising tides.
Le Prix Pictet & le
dveloppement durable / Nouvelle distinction pour les photographes,
Photographie Magazine, July 2008
Dark Matter, by Mary Mattingly
There has been much talk about climate change. But not much about
where we will see its first impact: water. Flooding. Drought. Contamination.
Water is the vector of climate change. By 2010 an estimated 40 per cent of the
worlds poorest people will lack access to clean water. Two hundred million may
be physically or economically displaced. This is not the future. This is now.
July 2008 - VSD Magazine, "Vision d'artiste
Apres le Deluge"
VSD: In Seven Firm Oligopoly and in The
Overaccumulation crisis, you show a pessimistic vision of the future of the
earth. Do you really think it could happen to our planet?
MM: I grew up in a flood-prone area and would
regularly worry about, clean up after, and protect against floods. During my
youth, water was a controversial topic in the town, as pesticides such as DDT
from the surrounding farms had polluted the well water, and buying city water
was a new solution to the pesticides found in the water table. I really started
researching issues surrounding water when its privatization started to become
more prevalent. I was reading articles about riots in Cochabamba, Bolivia,
because the citys residents were not able to afford the price of the newly
privatized water. That same year, the news described cataclysmic, devastating
floods from the UK to Cambodia, and Madagascar to Mozambique. There was immense
flood damage that year. Simultaneously, here in the United States, bottled
water and jugs of water are an essential commodity in our society. Watching the
position of water drift from being a natural resource to a commodity just
literally scared me. It continues to scare me that, as an overall trend, people
are depending on buying things, while forgetting how to make things, or, for
instance, depending on a large levee and relying on an inadequate evacuation
system. These are quick fixes for a global trend of not taking care of nature,
and of no longer knowing how to.
I began working on wearable homes in 2001,
largely as a result of the year 2000, during which I moved five times. I
imagined that I was acting as a model for future nomads, as now we are
beginning the culmination; to a point where everything is flexible, because it
needs to be, because living is about survival, functional space is a luxury,
products all want to be smaller, houses all want to be prefab, and waterfront
property is on a market downturn. A wearable home should not only be equipped
for the city nomad but for the future nomad who will need to travel through
each of the prevailing climates of the near future: arctic, desert, and
waterlogged tundra, illustrating different modes of survival.
For my recent work, I have been traveling to
places that were and are in danger of drought, in need of water, or that have
an excess of water due to melting glaciers or storms. I was able to experience
hardships from lack of water and difficulties communities face from changing
climates first hand, to study floodgates and rising tides, and at times I was
fortunate enough to be able to help in relief efforts. With the inclusion of
sculptures, the images that I make border fiction and reality. Depending on the
particular image and the sentiment that I want to evoke in the viewer, I use 3D
imaging programs and digital editing programs to create or alter initial
photographs so that they may tell a story and suggest a feeling that borders
between a warning and a reality I believe we are heading towards.
Are you inspired by the work of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC about the future of climate?
Where do you find inspiration?
In October of 2005, the United Nations
University predicted 50 million environmental refugees by the year 2010, as the
result of environmental crisis and slow-motion disasters due to the instability
of infrastructures resulting in famine, drought, disease, sea-level rise. I try
to figure out survival solutions daily, especially for the nomadic, whom I feel
will become a population majority in time. I have learned a lot through
studying Inuit cultures that have been surviving in extreme cold for centuries,
and nomadic desert tribes like the Tuareg tribe in Africa. This also helps me
learn more about human nature and fragility, needs, strengths, and our
intuition. I have worked much of this information into the Wearable Homes. I am
inspired by a lot of work by different organizations including the IPCC. I read
blogs related to the environment and technology, I regularly read magazines
like The Economist and Mother Jones, am inspired by attending conferences,
listening to a variety of podcasts, and reading a variety of theory as well as
fiction.
Do you know what scientists think about your
art? Did some of them come for example in New York, at Robert Mann Gallery, to
see it?
The scientists I have met are largely intrigued
by what I am trying to do, which is partly to add imagination to ideas based in
science. Some own installations or photographs I have made. I have made
inventions that are do-it-yourself interpretations and solutions to problems
like purifying dirty water, for instance, by reusing three plastic bottles to
create your own easy-to-make water purification system. My urge to make useful,
easy to use and easy to recreate inventions comes from the need I feel to
relearn people on how to live with nature, because we will need to. Some of
what I try to express in my photos is the danger that comes with forgetting how
to make things. We become dependent on having the option to buy everything, and
that gives the sellers so much power over us. The Waterpod project is allowing
me the chance to work closely with more scientists and inventors.
What about the Waterpod, is it currently
floating around Manhattan?
The Waterpod will launch May 2009. Initially, I
had planned to launch it this year, but the city of New York promised more
support if I were to wait a year to do the project. This alongside the fact
that in December and January I went to the hospital for two separate operations
due to appendicitis. The additional year to work on the project has allowed me
to expand it a great deal, I am now working with three other artists and a
growing team of volunteer scientists and green builders. We now have more
time and are gathering more support to do a wider experimentation with
materials and the portability of the overall design.
What is the message you want to send to
people?
I want to raise questions about the role of the
individual in a society and on our earth. I want people to question their
proscribed societal roles, and be independent from markets and other systems of
control. I want to motivate people to feel that they have the ability to change
things, make things, to create and recreate reality.
What do you think about the behaviour of US
government about climatic problems?
The United States was, as of 2005, the largest
single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. The US
government is largely ignorant and extremely slow in dealing with climatic problems,
and it is apparent that this is because of the interest in big business. The
fact that the government will not ratify the Kyoto Protocol until there is
participation by developing nations is extremely immature and irresponsible. On
the other hand, there is a very large grassroots movement (and
not-so-grassroots movement) in individual states, towns, cities, in Silicon
Valley, within organizations, and on individual levels.
July 2008 - Prix Pictet
Shortlist Winners, Financial Times
June 1, 2008
- Benjamin Genocchio, New York Times, "Today's Landscapes, Tomorrow's Dystopia"
There are a lot of ways to depict the landscape. You can
faithfully reproduce what you see; you can improvise, painting in an impromptu
manner without prior preparation or thought; or you can imagine a fictional
space. All of these options are sampled in Future Tense: Reshaping the
Landscape, the Neuberger Museum of Arts behemoth of a summer painting show.
Even with 10,000 square feet of exhibition space spread across a
pair of giant galleries, this exhibition of works by 60 artists still feels
packed. But while half the works here probably would have done the trick, few
joys in museumgoing can compare with the delights of an intelligently themed
show.
Theme shows are about ideas, and Future Tense is no exception.
It was conceived by its curators, Dede Young and Avis Larson, to demonstrate
ways in which the age-old genre of landscape painting is changing and evolving
to reflect more contemporary issues. It is a smart, alluring and wide-ranging
curatorial thesis.
The landscape tradition originated in the Netherlands in the 17th
century, but didnt really begin to flourish as an art form for another century
or so. In the 19th century it came to be associated with Romanticism and the
picturing of nature as a sublime, godly creation only to fall out of favor in
the 20th century.
These days, landscape painting survives as a charming vestige of
the past photography and film have all but replaced it as the dominant means
of recording the world around us. They are faster and more accurate and far
more accessible. But while painting itself may be arcane, this show suggests
that a great deal of contemporary landscape painting is nonetheless timely and
relevant.
The exhibition also includes a handful of photographs, sculptures
and drawings, all of them related to the landscape tradition. Among this
group is a pair of intriguing new photographs by Mary Mattingly. Her work
focuses on environmental issues, from rising sea levels to the scarcity of
and global competition for fresh water. Building Paradise (2007) depicts
menacing ocean waves encroaching on eroded shoreline.
Future Tense:
Reshaping the Landscape, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, 735
Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, through July 20.
May 2008 - Earth Bytes:
Engaging Dystopia, Sun Valley Plum
Mary Mattingly, The
Family of Man, 2007
Anne
Reed Gallery's current exhibition, Engaging Dystopia, is a thought-provoking
and visually exciting exhibition of artists responding to imminent ecological
disaster. Joshua Jensen-Nagle creates poignant photographs of the animals with
whom we share our world; Mathias Kessler brings stunning photographs of the
shrinking ice flows of Greenland, and Mary Mattingly shares her vision of
humans in a starkly beautiful new future. Plum TV covered the exhibition for
its Earth Bytes segment. The entire story can be seen at:
http://sunvalley.plumtv.com/stories/earth_bytes_engaging_distopia
For more information and images of all the work in the
exhibition go to www.annereedgallery.com
December 2007 -
Gundel-Maria Busse, Schon Und Schrecklich, Main Echo
November 2007 - Von
Sylvia Staude, Holt Uns Endlich Ab, Frankfurter Rundschau
November 2007 - Le Monde
Magazine, France "Faut-Il Climatiser La Terre?"
Drome Magazine, Italy
"Frontier, Mary Mattingly", November 2007
The Expedition, Mary Mattingly, 2007
- PHOTO September 2007
Miranda Sharp, Work by
Mary Mattingly, C-Photo Magazine
Issue 5: Mary Mattingly
Portfolio excerpt Brownday, 25 x 50 Digital C-Print
July 19, 2007
Stephen Vincent Kobasa,
New Haven Advocate. Stranger Than Truth"
What will we see at the
end of the world? July 24, 2007
Mary Mattingly, Hibernation, 2006.
What will we see at the
end of the world? The long starving or the brief flicker of detonation? Mary
Mattingly has produced some photographs from a possible future
Stephen Vincent Kobasa,
Thursday, July 19, 2007 New Haven Advocate. Stranger Than Truth: What will we
see at the end of the world? Post-apocalyptic nomads are just the beginning.
Neuberger Museum Interview 04/2008
In what ways does your work reflect a concern
with environmental changes?
My work focuses on many environmental elements including
water, from rising sea levels to privatization to water purification, to the
effects on land and people in a situation lacking water, desertification of
land, flooding of land, and mobilization of people. Aside from being the
only non-replaceable element on earth, water expresses change, movement, and
relates to transmigration.
When I create sculptures, the majority of the
elements used are found objects. I create machines and structures that
are cobbled-together to represent new ways of living, surviving, and
existing.
I am concerned with the survival of people in a
changing environment and at a time of cultural and economic change that is
fueled by globalization as well as our changing ecologies. How will
these changes affect us? How will we prepare? What will we do, will we
create? Wander? Search?
From what sources do you gather information
pertinent to your art?
My information-gathering process begins with my
immediate, daily surroundings. Whether I am residing in a city or
countryside, I am affected by everything around me. My daily practice
consists of reading newspapers (NY Times, Financial Times usually), magazines
(Economist, Wired, National Geographic lately), blogs (Worldchanging.org among
a dozen others). I often look at data visualizations of information and
occasionally watch movies, usually read nonfiction, right now I am reading
Nomadology: The War Machine by
Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Whiteheads Adventures of Ideas .
If you feel artists have a sense of social
responsibility, how does your work reflect this?
I do feel that as humans, it is our job to have
a level of compassion for the world and others, and that encompasses a sense of
social responsibility. Personally, I feel a deep concern with my
realization that humans are headed for multiple disasters because of the way
that we exploit the earth and each other. I feel paralyzed if I feel that
I am not doing anything, even the smallest amount, about this.
How does the prevailing point of view in your
work connect to the way you choose to live?
One of my current projects is the
Waterpod. The Waterpod is a floating sculptural Living Structure designed
as a new eco-habitat for the global warming epoch. It will launch in New York
in May, 2009, from the Newtown Creek between Brooklyn and Queens, navigate down
the East River, explore the waters of New York Harbor, and stop at each of the
five boroughs. As a completely sustainable, navigable living space, the
Waterpod showcases the critical importance of the environment and serves as a
model for new living technologies. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of
home, and of community, its only permanence being change, flow, and
multiplicity. With this project, I hope to encourage innovation as we visualize
the future fifty to one hundred years from now.
Artists have the ability to grasp momentous
changes, so how can the arts have an influence over public consciousness?
The Arts can have an influence over public
consciousness by illuminating what is important and presenting it in profound,
indelible ways. We can describe, depict, inform, and inspire, depending
on how our work speaks to others.
How can art institutions, such as museums,
make a crucial difference to the future?
Museums and art institutions can make a crucial
difference to the future by elevating art and maintaining its position as
ennobler, inspirer, and instigator.
If you feel environmental activism is a
movement that will define a generation, or help define the beginning o the
millennium, what would you say is key?
I would say that repetition is key. As
society reaches a tipping-point (I think this will be a large-scale disaster of
some sort) if there is enough information reverberating in the sound waves, and
in the general airs of conversations, the two will be associated, and this can
create change. It s like thinking about Uncle Tom s Cabin as a tipping-point for a large
percentage of the American population to realize that slavery of humans needed
to stop. We don t know what the tipping point will be, but the
information and the facts need to be told repeatedly to a public who doesn t
want to understand, and in this case, to big business, who doesn t want the
public to understand.
In what way is your choice of medium
influenced by the statement you want to make?
I like to work with photography and video
because of what great tools they are for storytelling, especially the
latter. Photography is still associated with repeating what is physically
there, and when we see a photograph, we want to believe it is real. The
Waterpod, to me, is creating the future for the present day, it is literally
extracting some of my photographic elements (Seven-Firm Oligopoly, for example)
from their place and time, and expelling them into the present, physical world.
How is your career fed/dueled by politics?
The money that helps make political decisions
interests me more than the politicians who enact and implement them. I
don t follow politics as closely as I follow industry and market forces.
Cover story by Jackie
Delematre, Gimme Shelter, New York Press, April 2007
Japanese Esquire
Magazine, "Photography in New York," April 2007
September 2006
Karen Rosenberg, An
Inconvenient Half-Truth, New York Magazine,
(Photo: Courtesy of the Robert Mann Gallery)
In Mary Mattinglys photo series Second Nature, the Earth has
been submerged, and the remaining humans eke out isolated, nomadic existences.
Her images may be staged and digitally enhanced, but like the other photographs
and videos in ICPs triennial Ecotopia, they seize on the very real anxieties
created by a few seasons of hurricanes, tsunamis, and record-breaking heat.
From Oregons clear-cut forests to Israels pine groves planted over the ruins
of evacuated Arab towns, these artists show the natural environment as less a
refuge than a global battleground.
Ecotopia, International Center of Photography; September 14 through
January 7
Ecotopia, Aperture,
September 2006
Brigid Hughes, A Solution
to an Inconvenient Truth, A Public Space, September 2006
JAMES WAGNER
Mary Mattingly at White
Box: Fore Cast: An Environmental
Disaster Opera installation and performance [an image from the performance of
December 19]
Because of the ambience (shadows, respectful movement and low
buzz) of dozens of my fellow acolytes at the opening reception on Tuesday,
"Fore Cast", Mary Mattingly's ambitious "Environmental Disaster
Opera" currently in engagement at White Box seemed to me to play almost as
much as a recreation of a narrow historic scene as a prediction of a much
larger and horrible future world. It was my birthday. I was in a very good mood, so I found myself
thinking of the legendary (and much-lamented) "happenings" of the
1960's Cold War era as I was contemplating the artist's somewhat less happy
theatrical representation of a world engaged in the details of survival during
World War IV.
An excerpt from the press release provides a little more context:
Entering a water-filled and truncated landscape, viewers witness
the land's predicted end-state, a reversion to its primeval condition and a
topographical perspective of a sick new world. The marshy waterscape is the
setting for the future of a civilization ensnared in an unceasing loop of WWIV,
a war Albert Einstein foreshadowed as being fought with sticks and stones. Mary
Mattingly creates an installation explains the tragic outcomes of this
hypothesized war in the not-so-distant future.
Multiple video projectors arranged in a semi-circle fill the walls
of White Box and present a "Fore Cast" that will loop for six days
and one hour. (A new week, according to Mary Mattingly's proprietary uniform
time scale, derived from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian astronomical
methodology and translated to a system for future use.) The videos play
continuously in White Box's waterlogged space. The main screen portrays WWIV,
fought by six groups of combatants ---The World Economic Forum, The Council on
Foreign Relations, Bechtel, Nestl, The United Nations, and B.R.I.C.---
colluding to capture and assert political and economic control over a shattered
and borderless world. The belligerents' leaders plot together in a corporate
conference rooms, ultimately degenerating into intercontinental world-scale
conflict fought with the weapons of Cain and Abel, the war unfolding in
disastrous environments everywhere.
Unlike the war itself, "Fore Cast" is going to have a
very short run: When it closes at 1:00 am on Christmas morning it will have
been open to the public for only six days and one hour (the doors opened the
morning of December 19). There will be another live performance during the
closing reception at Midnight, December 24.
March 2006
Martha Schwendener,
Mary Mattingly
Robert Mann Gallery
Loss-Accountability of
Top-Down Ontologies, 2005, color photograph, 30 x 30
In a statement posted on the wall in her recent exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery, Mary Mattingly voiced a few concerns driving her new body of work. I think about technology, she writes, the constant mediator between you and me As technology expands exponentially, we will reach a point where we exist as wanderers in our own worlds, participants in simulated communities. She goes on: I think about mobility how it will become necessary for us to be able to move freely with no ties to a permanent home, due to environmental changes and the necessity to participate in a global economy.
But while Mattingly ruminates on technology and
mobility, her lush, carefully crafted C-prints offer visions of a world thats
less about expansion than decline: post-apocalyptic landscapes vaguely
reminiscent of barren Yves Tanguy visions, in which civilization seems to have
been overwhelmed by vast oceans and overgrown, some of them populated by
aimless, ominous figures. Technology in these works is diminished, ad hoc, and
scrappy. In constructing her images, the artist builds sculptures out of ragged
bits of fabric, wire, wood, and metal, then situates them so as to suggest
jerry-rigged communication devices in a world that has devolved into a posttech
Dark Age comparable to the one detailed in David Mitchells novel Cloud Atlas
(2004). Loss-Accountability of Top-Down Ontologies, 2005, depicts, with some
digital help, an illuminated CVS sign nestled into a copse of pines on a
deserted northern island a Romantic tableau reminiscent of an Asher B. Durand
painting, reconfigured here in color photography as luminous as an image from
an oil
companys annual report. Hirshworld 2, 2004,
another island-scape, improbably hosts a Filenes department store, while Go
Forth and Multiply, 2005, depicts a watery world in which trees sculpted out of
paper-mch (one such object was exhibited in the middle of the gallery) bear
multiple fruits, like an Eden turned bioengineering disaster. The figures are
another story. Clad in costumes that conjure Commes des Garons or Philippe
Starck via an array of egregious pointy appendages, they look like characters
whove just wandered out of an avant-garde opera. In Brownday, 2004, three of
them stand, posed, waist-deep in misty waters. Possibilities for Multilateral
Communication, 2004, captures a man wearing a futuristic version of a
Breton-style bonnet crouched on a barren beach. The alienated figure, sitting
in front of a contraption that looks like a homemade radar dish, becomes in
this context both advanced and anachronistic, harking back to Caspar David
Freidrichs Lone Monk by the Sea, 1809, as he stares into the abyss. But while
the humans (or humanoids?) populating these images must resort to making
communications devices out of junkyard refuse, Mattinglys tools are state of
the art. Her props, costumes, and backdrops (some based on photographs taken on
trips through the US and Scandinavia) are digitally manipulated and/or based on
downloaded images. Many of the finished works function like film stills, their
subjects frozen mid-action, and the precise applications of her
sculptures-cum-devices are usually implied rather than overt. In both respects,
her aesthetic resembles Matthew Barneys and one cant help feeling that a
similar move into film and video might allow her
to sidestep the provision of the contextual helping hands offered by titles and
wall texts, and delve still deeper into her post-everything cosmology.
-Martha Schwendener
February 2006
Eric Gelber, Eric Gelber
on Mary Mattingly at Robert Mann Gallery
Mary Mattingly: Second
Nature
By ERIC GELBER
COVER February 2006:
Hirshworld 2 2004, chromogenic dye coupler print, 30 x 60 inches
All images courtesy
Robert Mann Gallery
Mary Mattinglys photography explores many
themes and concepts: home, travel, cartography, human relationships, human
interaction with the organic world, the corporate entities that have influenced
and shaped so much of our lives, language, the privatization of natural
resources such as fresh water, the blurring of the boundaries between reality
and virtual reality. To do this the artist has invented an imaginary terrain
populated by navigators who have wearable homes and are mentally and materially
equipped to survive a rootless existence. Her navigators are humans who have
learned to survive in a landscape reconfigured by the rising tides.
The photographs in this exhibition are all
extrapolations. Mattinglys work is Science Fiction (SF) in the sense that it
is predominantly cerebral, focused on ideas. That is why they feel a bit cold.
Humanistic values are forsaken and technology and humans become one in her
vision of the future. As Carl Freedman writes in Critical Theory and Science
Fiction (2000), SF is of all genres the one most devoted to historical
specificity, for the SF world is not only one different in time or place from
our own, but one whose chief interest is precisely the difference that such
difference makes and, in addition, one whose difference is nonetheless
contained within a cognitive continuum with the actual.
Exploration of the artists website
[marymattingly.com] helps one learn about the visionary objects and garments
appearing in these photographs. On a page titled theevolutionoflanguage
Mattingly provides us with definitions of 26 new words, which are hybrids of
existing words or word roots. This
generation of something new through the process of combining fragments of
existing systems parallels what Mattingly does with her photographs. These
terms help us to understand Mattinglys extrapolations concerning human
consciousness and the material and natural world.
The nomadic humans of the future will have
accessories -- elements as the artist puts it -- which will help mitigate the
alienation they feel due to being unable to discern one architectural space
from the next. They will wear celcerforms to protect against the growth of
cancerous tumors. The headiest accessory described in this dictionary is the
G-Simpod, a handheld device which provides for every need, at least in a
virtual sense. One emergency button on this device makes the user feel warm and
fuzzy in his/her brain and erogenous zones, and inspires them to spend money in
a mall-space or store-space. The second emergency button satisfies all of
the users cravings, such as hunger, by stimulating the brain or hypothalamus
with electrodes. Mattingly suggests that this device is a God-substitute,
providing graphics and sounds that enable the user to comfortably avoid human
interaction by transforming the intangible into the tangible.
While it becomes apparent that some of
Mattinglys futurology is tongue-in-cheek, it is clear that she concurs with
the writings of Ray Kurzweil (who is quoted on her website), especially such
optimistic notions put forth by the inventor/philosopher as We will literally
multiply the intelligence of our civilization by merging with, and
supplementing our biological intelligence, with this profoundly more capable
nonbiological intelligence by a factor of billions, ultimately trillions. And
that will dramatically change the nature of human civilization. That in a
nutshell is what the singularity is all about. Because Mattingly believes that
we can capture our authenticity through technology rather than through nature,
her images are more earnest than ironic.
Mattingly uses digital photography to create
images of a world she believes humans will one day live in. Her imaginings are
based on current scientific beliefs, which she imaginatively builds upon. But
they are also critical science-fictional estrangements, in that they provide a
critique of the homogenization of the environment by corporations. Mattinglys
photographs suggest that in the future we will be forced (or choose) to live
completely nomadic lives or compete with corporate superpowers for the few
remaining land masses or tiny islands that still exist. Humans will transform
into comfortably numb spiritually attuned navigators, entities who no longer
distinguish between reality and virtual reality, will be forced to live
transient existences, constructing portable shells or ad hoc dwellings to
protect themselves against unstable weather patterns, and will comfort
themselves with technology.
Wearable homes, billowing, saggy,
multi-pocketed garments, will act as mobile storage containers for security
devices, vitamin supplements, and the above-noted gadgetry. This new transience
will not lead to dystopia but will bring people together in accordance with
The New Way, or the church of the customer. Mattingly imagines future
populations becoming one through the virtual spaces of the net and building
self-sufficient barges or islands where navigators can spend their days. We
will measure time in a different manner, breaking the day up into four
sections rather than the current arrangement of day and night.
People in these photographs are completely
inward. They dont address the viewer or other people within the frame and they
are completely absorbed by the imaginary devices Mattingly has equipped them
with. They cling to them as they wander around the barren landscape or tinker
with them in a complete state of absorption. Figures are half submerged in
water, are plunged in a dense wall of fog or are completely alone on a desolate
shoreline. Their facial expressions are blank. There is no room for angst or
despair in this futurologists vision.
Mary Mattingly Always On
2005
chromogenic dye coupler
print, 29-1/2 x 22-1/4 inches
In these photographs we see navigators and
re-imagined landscapes created through a variety of means: there is seamless
digital merging of imagery created with 3-D imaging programs like Bryce or
Maya, topographical photographs taken in different parts of the world, and posed
photographs of models in costume with hand made props. This blending of the
completely fabricated and the actual increases the verisimilitude of
Mattinglys vision of the future. Not unlike good SF books, Mattingly
challenges our sense of the stability of reality by insisting upon the
contingency of the present order of things.
Mattingly is so dedicated to her inventions and
the belief that one day they will be used to alleviate the suffering of
populations dealing with limited natural resources, that she spent a month
living in the desert outside of Bend, Oregon experimenting with prototypes that
appear in these photographs. I wore a wearable home, equipped with a
toolbelt, a tazer and pack of 9V batteries, solar-recording equipment from
sponsor companies like Spy Emporium, pockets for a months worth of vitamins
and other compact food sources, compass, diary, analog camera, and a prototype
Blackberry that would pick up signals as far as 50 mi. out of range. She also
admits to living a vagabond existence, moving over five times within a short
span of time. So her visual predictions about the fate of the earth, her
jarring cognitive estrangements, have a personal dimension, are perhaps the
wish fulfillments of a person with a restless temperament. These nomadic
figures could also be stand ins for the wandering photographer who leads a sort
of transient existence, searching out new subject matter with camera in hand.
A number of these carefully constructed C-prints
are mediations on the tenacity, longevity and hubris of corporate entities
through time. In Go Forth and Multiply, 2005, weird manufactured tree
shapes loom in a flooded coastal zone. It is hard to make out what is sprouting
from or dangling from these faux trees, but the actual sculptural prop
appearing in the photograph is placed in the middle of the gallery and we can
examine it more closely. Plastic dates, bananas, pineapples, and apples hang
from the tree and all of them are branded, Banana Republic, Lexus, Nestl, etc.
Considering that corporations are currently copyrighting parts of our genetic
code this doesnt seem so far fetched. In a darkly humorous and enigmatic
C-print titled Hirshworld 2, 2004, there are two desolate looking tree filled
islets in close proximity to a cleared islet with an ominous looking Filenes
Basement on it. This retail store/evil castle has an ominous presence in the
waterscape because we dont know what relationship exists between it and the
humans who pass it by on their ad hoc flotation devices.
In the most disturbing C-print in the exhibit,
Loss-Accountability of Top-Down Ontologies, 2005, we see a tree filled islet
with an ominous CVS sign with accompanying digital billboard advertising a sale
on bleach rising above the trees, and a long metal utility pole with a security
camera mounted on top of it, scanning the surrounding waters. This photograph
is not a prediction of the future, but it does estrange us from our present
reality. A chainstore located on a desolate islet surrounded by large stretches
of water is absurd but it forces us to think about how ubiquitous corporate
entities are in our lives.
Hopefully Mattingly will challenge herself in
the future by adding more layers to her extrapolations, different scientific
concepts, some theoretical and some backed up by more concrete evidence. Her
constructive, photographic, and sculptural imaginings are fanciful but it is
important to the artist that we believe that they could be a reality someday.
Her discovery that digital manipulation of photographic material can be used to
explore possible futures for the human race and the planet is the most exciting
thing about her work.
She believes that when humans and technology
arrive at a common center it will be a positive event, the necessity of nomadic
lifestyles in the future will be aided by and made tolerable with the help of
the portable technology we have slowly come to love and depend on.
Interestingly, Mattingly tries to convince us in her photographs that humans
will become more humanized or self aware through their deepening dependence
upon technology. Although people might consider the landscapes in these
photographs to be dreary and barren (There will be little difference between
here and there.), the images try to convince us that the homogenization of the
landscape through cataclysm might free us up from dependence upon possessions and property and allow us to
explore inner spaces without hindrance.
ERIC GELBER is Associate Editor at
artcritical.com. An artist as well as a critic, he has also written for
Sculpture, Artnet and the New York Sun.
Joshua Johnson,
"Mary Mattingly at Robert Mann".
Mary Mattingly at Robert
Mann by joshua johnson, January 2006
Evoking a post-Katrina New Orleans scavenged by Techno-nomads was
probably not Mary Mattinglys intention, but that image gives credence to her
ability to produce work with hermeneutic flexibility. Now showing at the Robert
Mann gallery, Mattingly produces work that draws from a variety media and
disciplines. Her digitally manipulated photographs give us a glimpse of a
water-soaked world where the boundaries between nature and technology blur and
become indistinguishable. These images, often hazy and heavy with atmosphere,
open into a near deserted world, where lonely travelers, dressed in costumes
that recall something between the movie Dune and Pieter Brueghal, attempt to
survive on the gleanings of a post-globalized society.
Mattingly, in her writings, often confronts the increasing
homogenization of culture, and the destruction of the environment as major
sources of inspiration for her work. Perhaps, then, it is not so far off to
draw parallels with New Orleans when approaching these images. The disaster
that is Katrina may have been the result, not only of a distressed environment,
but also of a political system that is increasing nationalistic in a globalized
world. Let us not forget that Washington has focused most of its energies on
the war in Iraq (a go-at-it-alone war that has lead to no small amount of
ill-will in the rest of the world), leaving FEMA with reduced resources and
incompetent management. The sort of post-apocalyptic culture that Mattingly
envisions is a kind of cautionary moral, warning us of the dangers of the
rapidly changing political and environmental landscape.
That is not to say that her work is didactic in any sense. The
themes that Mattingly has touched upon, while contemporary, also maintain a
sense of timelessness. Her work draws upon the sort of binary opposites
essential to the structural properties of mythologynature vs. technology, man
vs. nature, etc.and weaves them into a cohesive aesthetic. Like Matthew
Barney, her work builds upon the new media experiments of the last decade, and,
rather than focusing on their formal characteristics, wields them in service of
a larger narrative. This narrative, while it carries a warning, also holds the
hope that the continuing intersection of cultures and the environment generates
a world where man, however lonely he may seem, can still survive, even when he
appears lost in the sea.
January 2006
The New York Sun, "Second Nature at Robert Mann
Gallery."
Shows
of note Friday,
May 13, 2005 Mary Mattingly
What to make of this exhibit by Mattingly, a
graduate of New York's Parsons School of Design and Yale fellowship. The artist
is presenting new photographs, video and installation work at the Pacific
Northwest College of Art's Philip Feldman Gallery in a show co-presented by
Disjecta. Mattingly uses drawings on Plexiglas, film and Styrofoam to
"instruct and construct an environment of the future. It will be
interactive and, with a bit of luck, frighteningly lucid." Her works --
described as "somehow ethereal beyond ethereal; a vision of the future so
clairvoyant and harmonized and beautifully rendered that the format she works
in is barely recognizable as one of the present" -- are, according to the
release, based on work Mattingly did while in residence at Duende in Rotterdam,
where she "delved into art prophesy as a comment on contemporary society.
Developing a new rational for mobility and convenience, she introduced the
world to wearable homes as an abstract concept and a modern reality. . .
." She's got us thinking already. Pacific Northwest College of Art, Philip
Feldman Gallery, 1241 N.W. Johnson St.
The Portland
Mercury,Review, We Go Round and Round in the Night, May 2005.
We Go Round and Round in the Night by
Ryan Dirks
.
Video still from I Die Daily
We Go Round and Round in the Night
Mary Mattingly, PNCA's Feldman Gallery 1241 NW Johnson,
through June 25
"I
believe wearable homes will be a necessity in the
future," said artist Mary Mattingly, seated in front of a small gathering
at PNCA's studios. "They will have pockets for your medications and
artificial arms so you don't have to actually touch others"
Part
science fiction novel and part political critique, Mattingly's work explores a
world that is both bleak and alluring. Her current exhibit at PNCA's Feldman
Gallery utilizes photography, film, and installation, touching on the related
themes of corporate monopolization, globalization, and the increasing
atomization of the individual. "Nomads," "island builders,"
and "survivors" wander desolate landscapes of sand and water,
crafting strange technological machines in homage to a consumer society that
has defeated them. A lone figure--draped in one of Mattingly's flowing wearable
homes--traverses a watery infinity like a zealous pilgrim with no destination,
or sets up a make-shift satellite phone for a conversation with some distant,
automated voice.
The PNCA
exhibit is a homecoming of sorts for the artist, who graduated from the school
in 2002 before moving to Brooklyn, NY. Her website (www.marymattingly.com)
serves as a virtual decoder ring, collecting vocabulary words, symbols, and
products, all of which drive home the homogenous existence we will all soon
live. Mattingly couples her "message" with a sense of wonder and a very
tactile aesthetic. Her constructions--made of fabrics, cardboard, metal, and
rubber tubing--have an attraction unto themselves. The future may be doomed,
but apparently it still has a pretty great view.
PNCA is
not Mattingly's only Portland connection. She has been collaborating with Paul
Middendorf (creative director of Manifest Artistry, visual arts director of
Disjecta) on the Lifeboat project. The two set up temporary islands or boats
off the coast of major art fairs, where they curate mini-exhibits that
"speak about changing borders in the USA, policies for immigration,
nautical utopias, pirates, flags, and other symbols of limited realities."
I've heard they also have a lot of fun.
Photography Quarterly
Cover and article Mary Mattingly, March 2004
February 26, 2003
Village Voice, Mary
Mattingly by Vince Alletti.
Mary Mattingly
Mattingly isnt exactly
breaking new ground with her pictures of anonymous urban and suburban nightscapes (a few of which
are of scale-model constructions), but shes got a sure sense of color and
composition, and she succeeds in rendering these empty expressways, parking
lots, and other transient spaces under blazing street lamps as a weirdly
desolate, gorgeously cinematic no mans land.